2014 Steering Committee Elections: Candidates and Rules

This thread is for members to enlist as candidates for the Steering Committee.

What is the Steering Committee ?

The five members of the Steering Committee get to vote on important decisions for the Orchard project. This is not a technical role (we don't vote on design and technical decisions), and all candidates are welcome, as long as they are contributors in one form
or another.

Will candidates please declare themselves and explain in a few sentences why they should be one of the five people who will make the governance decisions for the whole Orchard community?

Schedule

This thread is open until December 2nd at 12:00PM Pacific Time, at which time a new thread will be open for voting (secret voting will also be available) and remain open for two weeks.

Who can vote?

Can vote anyone who, between October 1st 2013 12PM PT and November 18th 2014 12PM PT has done any of the following contributions:

published a message on the discussions forum (spam doesn't count)

published or commented a work item

published or commented a pull-request

published some documentation

attended the Harvest conference

How to vote?

Each person has five votes to cast on five candidates of his choice. You cannot cast more than one vote on a single candidate. You do not have to spend all of your votes. You can vote by simply replying to the voting thread, or if you prefer to vote secretly,
you will be able to do so using e-mail. Once the vote is closed, results and winners will be announced. The five new elected members will then proceed to elect the Benevolent Dictator.

This is with deep regret that I am announcing that this year, I am again a candidate to be a steering committee member.

Last year, the main reason I urged you to vote for me was - and I quote myself here - that "you would be in really deep shit if you didn't !". Actually this is no more true, thanks to people like Zoltan, Sipke and Daniel who contribute more code than
what I can do these recent days, and all the other VERY active members. We are blessed to have such a great set of personalities who grow the Orchard we love today.

But I am sure I still can be helpful to keep the project sane or provide guidance for this year again, for so many reasons that it would be foolish not to vote for me. Or just to please my ego.

I just hope this next year will see as much growth as we saw this past year, and I will do my best for it.

I hope you will again consider my candidacy and renew my role as a steering committee member.
As you may know, I am passionate about Orchard. Nothing excites me more than to think where we are today and to realize its potential. I think it's The Ultimate .NET OSS CMS on .NET today. And yet there is still much to be done.

Orchard has seen a lot of new features and enhancements, and I am proud to have played a part in all that.
My short-term next goals are to document some of the features we built, such as
AuditTrail, Layouts and Dynamic Forms.
My longer-term goals are to make Orchard look better so that the default website looks even more awesome than TheThemeMachine.
The same goes for the back-end - that needs not only a Bootstrap overhaul, but an improved design: optimized navigation UI, tabbed editors, admin-wide search, and more, including modernizing it. Other than that, I will continue working on bugfixes, performance
improvements, help out as much as I can on the forums, and keep blogging. I actually have more on my sleeve, but all that shall be revealed over time.

I regret to announce that you will also have to count on me this year to be a candidate for a spot on the committee.

I'm one of the founders of the Orchard project, and I participated in all the design decisions that made it what it is today. Since the foundation, I've written much code and documentation, I helped countless people on the forums, participated in all the meetings
I could attend, gave the keynote at each of the three Harvest conferences, talked at conferences (here's my talk at TechEd Europe:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Europe/2014/DEV-B220), wrote dozens of blog posts (https://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/Tags/Orchard), and answered twice as many questions on Stack
Overflow about Orchard as the next guy (http://stackoverflow.com/tags/orchardcms/topusers). I'm also the author of many modules that you can find on the gallery, including Nwazet
Commerce, the most advanced 100% Orchard commerce module. Oh, and the steering committee was my idea :)

Today, I make a living 100% on Orchard. I'm in the trenches with you.

For the future, I'll continue to promote Orchard, to write about it, to answer questions, to create documentation, modules, and to contribute to the core. I'll help with the design of the features that will take us to the next stages. And I'll be here twice
a week for our community meetings.

I'll be honored if you renew the confidence you've put in me these past years, and re-elect me as a steering committee member.

This allowed me to participate in November to the MVP Summit in Seattle, on the Microsoft campus.
I met many other MVPs from all around the world and talked with some people of the ASP.NET team that develop the next version of ASP.NET.

I spent the last 10 years following the enhancement of the .NET Framework and the ASP.NET stack.
I am happy to have made the choice 4 years ago to help this great project and that Microsoft, little by little, joined this open source way of thinking.

The DotNet Foundation will hopefully give us a chance to grow the community.
The role of the committee is to hear the community but also sometimes to make choices and give a direction in the interest of the project.

In the near future, my goals are to achieve this tasks:

Admin Theme : Provide a Responsive Design to the Dashboard.

Help to redesign and integrate a new Orchard Project Theme.

Help any people who wants to create a new locale community.

Follow the new features of ASP.NET 5 and try to use them in the development of Orchard 2.0.

I've been involved in Orchard Project since its very early days, helping it transform from a few-man-show to a thriving developer community. Looking back at what we've been through and where we're now makes me proud, but more importantly - empowers to do more.

Having a lot of faith in this project I decided to become a 100% (no water added) Orchard consultant. Rolled out a company -
Proligence - to push this idea into life and now I make my whole living out of this. That being said - not planning to go anywhere else soon. I love this place:)

I've always thought about myself as an Orchard Developer Advocate with a goal of making this platform the best .NET base for building a variety of web-based systems.
And I'll stick to this idea. If you like it, I'd be honored for having your support!

Zoltán Lehóczky here - after being suggested by several community members I'd like to be a candidate this year.

Some introduction: I started with Orchard in 2011, a bit later co-founding the Hungarian Orchard community (English blog:
http://english.orchardproject.hu/) and a bit more later co-founding the Orchard-focused Lombiq Ltd. (http://lombiq.com/). Since 2012 I'm one of the
core contributors of Orchard. I've authored or contributed to around 70 open-source Orchard modules and themes (you can see them under my Codeplex profile) and opened more than 300 Orchard issues. I've been teaching Orchard on a university and via the Dojo
Course (http://orcharddojo.net/orchard-training/online-courses/dojo-course), been a presenter on all three Orchard Harvests and talked about Orchard in Hungary
on numerous meetups and conferences. BTW I'm the one doing the blog post aggregation on OrchardProject.net so if you have an Orchard blog not featured there, let me know.

As a Steering Committee member my main aim would be to make Orchard as transparent as possible. This means that if you ask questions like "Who runs Orchard's infrastructure?" (people responsible for tasks, different members), "Who makes decisions?"
(project governance) or "Where is the project headed?" (short-, mid-, and long-term goals), I want you to be able to find official, up to date answers.

These would be my personal goals for Orchard as a Steering Committee member:

Mid-term (within half a year-a year): new Orchard project home page that we long have in mind. Once the theming is done, Lombiq can provide development resources as promised before, also in form of myself.

Long-term (more than one year): grow Orchard into a reliable but progressive web framework and CMS. Keep flexibility and the love for developers but mature as a CMS (and the never-ending bug bashing).

Just as with the PR/bug triage meeting I'll propose "project management" improvements as necessary.

Hi everyone,
Benedek Farkas here! I would like you to consider me as well as a member of the Steering Committee.

I'm involved with Orchard and its community for more than 3 years now, since then I've learned a lot from Orchard and the core community and I hope that I managed to give back more than I gained by:

Co-founding one of the first local Orchard communities,
Orchard Hungary. We also blog as often as we can when we find some interesting piece of knowledge about Orchard in English to make sure we reach to widest audience possible.

Spreading the word about Orchard as much as possible by presenting and talking about Orchard in Hungary. I've also been a presenter at 2 out of the 3 (so far) Harvest conferences.

Co-founding Lombiq Technologies, an Orchard-focused company where we also work towards making Orchard and the Orchard developer experience better by contributions to the Orchard source, open-sourcing modules
and developer tools. Everyday I'm Orchardin'.

Giving you free Orchard websites on
DotNest, whenever you want. Showing off with Orchard has never been easier!

Helping other developers setting a foot in the depths of Orchard by posting articles and snippets on
Orchard Dojo. You can see me as the one of the lecturers of
Dojo Course, a university course about Orchard, accessible to anyone.

Recording and publishing the weekly podcasts to
YouTube. I'm the chronicler of Orchard. :)

Thanks to the trust of the "elders" of Orchard I have write access to the Orchard source and the documentation, so I have the tools at my disposal to help where I can. With your support I'll continue to work on those fronts above as much as I can
and help to make the Orchard community bigger and stronger. As the chronicler, what I think I can improve most is how news and decisions are presented to the existing community (What is this new feature good for? Why is this API changed? etc.) and newcomers
(Where do I fit into the community? How do I know Orchard fits my requirements? etc.).